Given the recent dramatic growth in wireless and cellular communications, more and more businesses and other entities are integrating themselves with mobile device technologies. In addition to standard voice features, modern cellular phones and similar devices provide countless other services, such as Internet access, electronic mail (email), short messaging service (SMS) texting, digital cameras, multimedia messaging service (MMS), Bluetooth, gaming, various web-based applications and the like. As a result, telecommunication carriers and network operators have been under increased pressure to provide more and more service offerings to their subscribers. Today's network operator wants to attract new customers while retaining existing ones, develop profitable new business models, improve returns and launch new services as quickly as possible.
Given all of this pervasiveness of mobile devices, users are quickly becoming used to taking their phones everywhere, including traveling to other countries and continents with different telecom networks and respective network operators. During such remote trips, the user's device is typically in a roaming mode, meaning that it is connected to wireless service in a location that is different from the home location where the service was originally registered. Roaming can ensure that the mobile device maintains connectivity to a network, however it often incurs additional charges for the user.
One problem that can arise in the context of wireless roaming is voicemail tromboning. Voicemail tromboning, sometimes also referred to as voicemail forwarding, can occur when a mobile phone that is in roaming mode receives an incoming call and allows it to go to voicemail, thereby forwarding the call back from the roaming network to a voicemail server back in the user's home network. In other words, this situation may cause two unnecessary international call-legs to occur when a mobile terminated call is forwarded back home while the subscriber is roaming. This extra hop of the incoming phone call can incur roaming fees, which is usually unexpected and is seen as unfair by many subscribers. For example, the subscriber may be roaming in a different country and get charged a substantial monetary amount twice (the first time for the call being delivered to the roaming handset device, and the second time for forwarding the call back to the subscriber's country to be handled by the voicemail server). In several countries, regulation has been enacted to prevent callers from being charged twice in such a manner. In light of this, a technique is desirable for preventing voicemail tromboning and similar problems caused by various forwarding of mobile calls, while still maintaining all connectivity and other services provided by the network operator.